I agree. I started a couple sites that made good google rankings. Unfortunately, they were not monetized properly and so I worked a lot for nothing. Not my fault really. I was learning the ropes of keyword research, seo and so on. Not monetization!
Now that I know better will I do the same? Yes and no. I will do the same things but make sure ahead of time that the keywords I am marketing a "buying" keywords and not "i want free information on..." keywords.
That's a whole different animal. A long story short, if you are going to do any experimentation with this just use common sense to determine if what you are marketing is something people will pay for, rather than just search for. I have two great sites with a lot of traffic but they are "information sites". No one will buy anything because they were looking for free info to begin with. Anything that you decide to experiment with, you would do good to include adsense ads on your site. Yes, you may not get rich but that is the one thing making me money off all that traffic and it's not a lot of money but it's something.
Hope it helps.

wait.....im so confused.......you guys are saying that if you want to make money with affilate programs the best way is with PPC?

what about all the methods on here....bum marketing, articles marketing, offline/online marketing, youtube marketing....all of them eventually lead people to an affilate program yet dont use PPC. your saying these arent the most effective?

i wish this game was as easy as setting up a site, using ppc to drive traffic and then making money on the conversions. if it is please point me to some methods or guides that show how to do this.

for a start make sure your offer pays high enough, use spyfu to check your competition. also check the adware networks, conversions will be less but youl be paying a lot less per click. id split the 140 in 1/4 test and tweak.

wait.....im so confused.......you guys are saying that if you want to make money with affilate programs the best way is with PPC?

what about all the methods on here....bum marketing, articles marketing, offline/online marketing, youtube marketing....all of them eventually lead people to an affilate program yet dont use PPC. your saying these arent the most effective?

There are different ways to make money online, PPC just speed up things (you recieve traffic instantly), at the cost of paying for every visitor you recieve. If you can't afford PPC advertising, or know very little about it, I advise you to tread carefully. PPC can get costly very fast. I know someone who tried PPC but knew very little of what they was doing and ended up $2500 in debt.

you can also make money with PPC without having a large budget if you target long tail keywords and small niches.

when I started with PPC my daily budget was about $5-$7 a day and I could only run two campaigns since I didn't have a job. These were profitable ppc campaigns and I was still making some money by not spending that much. It wasn't much but, I was still making money. after a few months I was able to get to $100/day in ppc spend. however, I do have previous PPC experience, just didn't have the budget. although I was still new to aff marketing.

long tail keywords don't get much traffic so the bids are really low. just incase if you don't know what long tail is, it's a keyword phrase atleast 3-4 words. example:

broad keyword: ringtones
longtail: download ringtones for free

you can find free $100 yahoo search marketing vouchers to start testing. just search yahoo/google and you'll find some quickly.

you were asking about SEO, i haven't done much SEO but, it's not something that's "basic" it's an ongoing long term project. continuously updating the content on your site (google really likes new and updated content), getting links, etc..

you should find small niches to rank for keywords easier. do a google search for a keyword you want to rank for and see how much competition you have. this is a major factor in determining how hard/easy it will be to rank for your keyword. normally I've seen if your keyword has less than 100K search results then it should be a good keyword to try and rank for. you can also check the backlinks of your competitors on the 1st page by using yahoo explorer. check to see if you think you would be able to get that many links.

you can also do a search on forums for "bum marketing". you should be able to find ways to make money without too much cash.

you can check adwords keyword estimator for search volume and avg cpc as well as the keyword tool at seobook.com for daily search volume on keywords.

The system you just mentioned is a good starting point. That's the basic idea.

Browse the Member Download section and find some research tools to put you more on target with PPC. Also don't just rely on adwords. When I first started I thought I would make a fortune with adwords and ended up losing a fortune.

I started using adbrite and marchex and have been successful with it. They are easy to use,they pay and have converted better for me than google.

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